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This may be a perfect example why no one should ever allow errors in a web page. Every browser reacts differently to errors so every page needs to be validated and be error free. Just today I had a guy tell me that validation is bull---- and here is an excellent example of how important validating is.

Just today I had a guy tell me that validation is bull---- and here is an excellent example of how important validating is.

You encountering that too? At least in this case his doctype is HTML, meaning validation isn't exactly 'efficient' - I had some joker claiming validation was nonsense, when his doctype was XHTML 1.0 Strict!

A good... 80% of the help questions on these forums could be avoided via validation, easy.

At least in this case his doctype is HTML, meaning validation isn't exactly 'efficient' - I had some joker claiming validation was nonsense, when his doctype was XHTML 1.0 Strict!

Actually, one could say that validation is more important for HTML than for XHTML. Errors like invalid tag names (<embed>) or attributes (topmargin) aren't necessarily very serious. Browsers that don't understand a tag will just render the content. Unknown attributes are discarded.

The main point in validation is to catch well-formedness errors (missing end tags, invalidly nested elements). Those errors are easily found with XHTML, because there will be a big, fat error message instead of the page. Provided you serve it as XML, of course, <facetious>but why wouldn't you? </facetious>.

With HTML (or XHTML-P) the browser won't give you an obvious error if you miss an end tag. The page will just look odd, because the browser will try to do the best it can to salvage the situation.